The melting point of many waxes and fats in extracts have low melting points
Compounds like oleamide palmiatic acid etc cloudiness can have disappeared deu to sufficient heating so they melted
Very likely it will be back in a few days
If not lucky you 
why would you extract colder (sacrifice yield) when going to distillate?
to avoid winterization?
do you have data suggesting thatās the more efficient route?
I donāt have solid data either way, as weāve not bothered with distillate in the last couple of yearsā¦but extracting warm, using heavy CRC, then winterizing before distillation, or as @Roguelab suggests between passes, seems like the route with the higher yields.
I donāt disagree that extracting colder will make winterization less of a necessity, but Iām not clear it will remove the need entirely, and Iām not convinced that the hit to yield is worth it.
winterizing NOW should solve @ChiefK19ās current issue, and imo is the better solution moving forward as well.
I agree ābestā may depend on available resources.
3 Likes
Donāt get me wrong, the most efficient way to distillate is through cold ethanol extraction. Winterization in my opinion decreases the efficiency of your operation (as well as increases labour costs and processing times) to the point that itās just not worth it for us.
Decarboxylated high quality BHO extract (that has not been distilled) is nearly a 1:1 substitute for distillate, weāve found. No winterization and no distillation necessary. Yes, you take a hit on the efficiency of the extraction, but downstream processing is so minimal that if you have excess cannabis, itās totally worth the loss.
2 Likes
Sounds like we agree on most of those points.
Iāve certainly witnessed some pretty inefficient winterization operations.
1 Like
Room temp ethanol for the win. Recover most of the ethanol with membranes and chill a 5-10% solution for winterization. That will take a fraction of the chilling capacity that youād use chilling all of your extraction solvent. Centrifuge/UF waxes. Water Wash the crude and throw it in the wiper.
Chilling your extraction ethanol is overrated. Save that energy for a more concentrated solution and clean up with water and distillation/ adsorbents. It works for material destined for distillation or crashing THCa.
6 Likes
Co2 can be tuned to first extract the terps selectively and then with other perameters pull cannabinoids and waxes, all depends on temp and pressure settings
Point taken, there are definitely efficiencies to be gained by your approach, likely cost reductions in electricity.
But then again, you also spend much more labour cleaning up crude (winterization, then to water wash I imagine you have to use a secondary solvent).
Plenty of ways to skin the cat.
I was not aware it went that low! My goal was to hit -40c and I only know I hit that because my temp gun stops reading anything lower that -40c. Helpful bit of info thank you.
This makes sense to me, along with what @cyclopath has mentioned. For now my solution is extract warmer with hydro, dissolve in ETOH to winterize, then distill.
I see how it is not the most efficient way but its the easiest change compared to what we were running last month, and I can propose changing to ETOH extraction down the line if they continue this path.
Many thanks to all!
@all this thread helped me a lot and now we are producing almost 10L of disty that tests in the %90s consistently and we see no cloudiness. Yall are a blessing
4 Likes
Use a non polar solvent to winterize, consider heptane, that increases the options for media to use in your winterization. you could dissolve your first pass distillate in heptane 5:1 minimum, add mag sil to make a slurry and pass thru a lenticular filter to remove mag sil, then add t5 to make another slurry and filter that through lenticular again to remove t5. rotovap to remove heptane and run through WFE on second pass parameters
1 Like